After their hefty wiretap law of 2008, the strange circumstances of the 2010 allegations against Assange and now this, it seems to me that their ties with US intelligence and administration are tighter than many swedish citizens realize.
I would be very interested to know what a swede has to say about this. My general impression of Sweden (at least sitting here in Germany), is that it is a liberal minded country by european standards - that is that in general the scandanavian countries are on the forefront as leading examples of how modern societies should behave.
This article seems to imply the opposite, why would Sweden veto this unless they have some serious spionage going on themselves? For me, it also makes the assange affair seem more dubious than before as if Sweden were basically following US mandate.
Conveniently, this doesn't separate between citizens and non-citizens, just traffic that crosses the border, and since most of us use services globally, most of our traffic crosses the border, and is therefore intercepted legally.
Sweden has an interesting relationship with NATO, in as such that the majority of the population would never want to join, but at the same time there has always been an expectation since the end of WW2 that it would be in the strategic interest of NATO to protect Sweden from Soviet/Russia. Sweden pays for this protection secretly by being a lapdog and the latest payment was of course an increase in the amount of intelligence data given to the US, and the FRA law provided the legal framework for increasing collection of such data.
During the public debate around the FRA law, opponents speculated that the law intention was never to catch terrorist. Rather, the law was to fill a gap in "goods" to use for trade with the international spying community, which previous was provided by radio surveillance directed at Russia.
If that theory was true, then the current actions of Sweden makes perfectly sense.
People here don't care. The general opinion about the right to privacy is that it's A Good Thing, but why would you care about your data if you have nothing to hide? The debate focusing on questions regarding privacy and integrity before the FRA law was a media charade and in the end people didn't care enough to oppose the FRA law. Most of the opponents were pirates and the debate often times came down to a discussion of intellectual property instead. Respectable members of society didn't want to associate with pirates, I guess.
What's happening now is just an extension of that. People know that the gouvernment collects the data. It's a bit weird that "we" veto something like this, but other than that there's nothing new.
There was this intelligence affair in the seventies called the IB affair where there was profiling (among other things) directed against left wing groups. It caused a big stir when it was revealed to the public. What's happening now is IMO more extensive, but what's known about the activities related to the FRA law is supported by law.
Political profiling is still criminal. We don't know of any political profiling taking place at the moment, but the FRA law certainly makes it easier.
The Swedish military is allowed to listen to all communications crossing the nations borders. All ISPs are also required to route all their traffic through the militarys network.
> as if Sweden were basically following US mandate
I have little doubt that it was. Sweden may be decades ahead in social liberties, but when it comes to the US, very few countries can say no to it. Europe has traditionally been under the US influence and, as the NSA scandal shows, it will continue to stay loyal and compliant.
For example, during the H1N1 vaccinations, a Finland woman that had some good credibility, pointed that the Sweden vaccines were dangerous, she claimed that Sweden had some sort of conspiracy with the US to get rid of young people.
Lots of people believed it was balooney at the time, but now we have Swedish young people with narcolepsy because of the vaccine (it only affected those below 20).
Now the balooney claim, look a lot less balooney... But I still wonder what the hell is going on sometimes... All of my ideas fail both henlan and occam razors, but maybe there IS some conspiracy really going on...
Please cite facts, not unsubstantiated tinfoil hat material devoid of citations.
I has been shown [1] that the risk of being affected by narcolepsy among children vaccinated with Pandremix is 4.19 times higher than the risk among children that were not vaccinated with that particular vaccine. This in Sweden, related to the H1N1 mass vaccinations.
69 verified diagnoses of narcolepsy were found among vaccinated children. It has not been proven that all cases of narcolepsy were directly caused by the vaccine.
Your claim that this Finnish woman's assertion that the Swedish gov't in cahoots with the US gov't wanted to "get rid of young people" is somehow not "balooney" is patently ridiculous based on the simple facts.
Did anyone in Sweden claim that the vaccines weren't dangerous? The point of vaccines is that they're less risky than the disease they're preventing, even considering the low likelihood of contracting a disease.
Since the 70s seemly all mass vacinations related to H1N1 caused more damage than the disease itself.
H1N1 spreads fast, but is not much deadly anymore.
Here in Brazil for example, H1N1 infected a good part of the population, but only about 100 people died, while common flu killed 100 people each day.
And the H1N1 vaccine also caused some mayhem.
I am not dismissing vaccines in general, or saying that even a dangerous vaccine is not worth it (the original vaccine, was very dangerous, yet made a disease get erased from Earth), but there was people saying specifically that the H1N1 vaccine that only Sweden used, was clearly dangerous for young people, too bad those people had no proof... But now that the vaccine DID caused more damage than the disease.
> Since the 70s seemly all mass vacinations related to H1N1 caused more damage than the disease itself.
Do you really think anyone will believe that if you don't give us a source?
The 2009 H1N1 pandemic alone killed between 151,700 and 575,400 people[1]. CDC estimates that in USA alone, 11,690 died and 257,000 ended up in hospitals[2]. I can't find any source that brings vaccine deaths to anywhere close to that.
In /r/sweden they basically say "This is a national security issue, EU isn't a nation, we want to deal with this ourselves". And then they rant a little on how the Guardian is way2leftist.
And it is. I don't know what the EU is trying to do, other than having Europe speak with one voice to make it more powerful. But truth be told, as the article points out, it is mostly to save face, I doubt European leaders are really that worried (or surprised).
Europe isn't that much better than the US, just more timid.
Yeah, I agree with their move here. If the EU really wants to start getting into issues that deal with fundamental sovereignty as opposed to the environment or labor and capital flows, I can think of a number of countries that would be out before the gavel even hit the block.
I live in Sweden. I share your general impression about the Scandinavian countries.
Our ethical and ideological standards seem to have been somewhat tarnished over the last decades, but I think the overall idea still seems to hold.
With regard to electronic surveillance Sweden does indeed have 'some serious espionage' going on. The expanded mandate for the FRA (one branch of Swedish intelligence service) has been mentioned several times in this thread. ISP:s and other providers of cable bound communications are obligated by law to send a copy of all communications to FRA. FRA has a mandate to monitor communications crossing the national borders. As HN readers will probably agree, it's not really feasible to make the distinction about borders at, so I surmise the arrangement must be one of collecting everything and filtering out the disallowed communications.
Sweden was early to build an extensive optic fiber infrastructure and as a result is a key area for European communications. Much of the information traffic of Northern Europe has a high chance of passing Swedish borders.
The current surveillance arrangement was legalized in 2008, under in my opinion scandalous conditions. Popular opinion, to the extent that people understood the issue, was strongly opposed to instating mass surveillance. Mass surveillance is arguably in violation of the Swedish constitution. Most referral organizations for the preparation of the law advised against it in no uncertain terms. The right wing coalition had plenty of internal opposition against the law (it comprises liberal parties, which are in many respects natural enemies of the surveillance state).
In spite of all this, the law was passed. The path there involved a lot of unpalatable things: The rhetoric was one usually reserved for wartimes, with a lot of scare about nebulous "external threats". Members of parliament for the dominant conservative party were told that voting against would be to "shoot at a conservative prime minister". Young and particularly liberal-minded members of the government parties (these were often people who had run for election on championing privacy and rights of the individual) had it made clear that their political careers would be very difficult from now on, should they choose to vote against the party line. One single such opponent voted against the law in spite of this, and another previously vocal opponent abstained from voting. The remaining ones turned to vote in favour of the bill, making it pass. The vote was placed as the last thing for the parliament to do just ahead of a major national holiday. There was a lot of unexplained urgency about passing the law /now/, to the point of 'let's pass it /now/ and we'll come back in the autumn season and amend the privacy protection'. There was numerous misrepresentations about how the system would work, what information would be gathered and the significance of the information, much like what we have been seeing from the NSA recently. (e.g outright ignoring legitimate concerns about privacy and trying to frame such concerns as quaint and uneducated. 'Nobody is going to read your email', and so on. (This one is /technically/ true in most cases -- if you are going to sift through the totality of a technologically advanced nation's data streams you don't do it by having people /read/ the contents. You push it through a supercomputer for analysis -- and yet it is effectively a lie to the uninitiated about what the issue is about))
I could go on about this for quite some time, but I think I have dwelt on this point enough for this format. For those who speak and read Swedish it may be interesting to review the news from around this time and in particular the parliament's session on the 17th. http://www.riksdagen.se/sv/Debatter--beslut/Debatter-och-bes...
To me, 18 June 2008 was the day Swedish democracy was ultimately subverted and my country was coerced to abandon the liberal and democratic ideals for which it has long been a bright example.
The current government of Sweden is in terms of political parties the same as it was in 2008. They rose to power arguably in no small part due to skilful spin doctoring and restyling of the conservative party as a party for the regular citizen rather than the elites. In practice the differences between these 'new' conservatives and the old ones has been small.
There are parallels in style to the "compassionate conservatism" of George W. Bush, and these parallels are probably not coincidental. I have seen it claimed that Karl Rove was the one who advised the campaign that established this current Swedish right wing government. Prime minister Fredrik Reinfeld liked to stress during the Bush era his good relation with Dubya and has described him in admiring words.
I seems to recall that parts of the diplomatic cables released by Wikileaks contains text to the effect that this Swedish government was considered 'cooperative' but had 'some difficulties with public opinion'. Perhaps someone more familiar with the diplomatic cables can clarify or elaborate.
My opinion is that the current Swedish government probably still has deep ties to the US government and is very anxious to be considered a valuable partner. The FRA mass surveillance infrastructure in Sweden would certainly make a valuable source of "signal intelligence" for the US and I would not be that surprised to see Sweden as deeply involved as Great Britain.
The Swedish people do not in general sympathize with the surveillance state, but many people seem to have a rather limited understanding of what has been done and the extent of how it could be used.
This is another example of the real life ungovernability of the EU in relevant things.
On the other hand they pass a lot of truly relevant laws like a new one concerning the minimum distance of chickens in egg-farming plants in 2012: just in the middle of the crisis, Greece, Ireland &c.
I believe in the idea of a united Europe, but it is hard to see how we can get to there from here. Right now it is a bit like a Polish parliament ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_parliament_%28expressio... ) in that a small country that has a particularly stupid government at the moment (or that can be strong-armed or corrupted by an empire like the US) can block sensible reform. And we all know how well Poland did when they were unable to make any decisions....
I think people forget that the EU exists somewhere between Federal-style government (the US for example) and pure international organisations (The UN, etc). You can look up where its sole and shared competences lie in articles 3 and 4 of the treaty that established it, but it's not a long list and mostly concerns the operation of the common market (the free movement of goods, services and people) and a grab bag of smaller roles.
The tension inherent in that set-up is between the individual powers of sovereign nations and the collective policy of the group. In this instance, there's no doubt that Sweden and the UK are helping the US in vetoing, but there's a parallel concern that the EU does not have competence to negotiate on this, and I imagine a strong desire to prevent mission creep.
As to the broader question of ungovernability - I'd argue that the really interesting question is whether it is possible to maintain a firewall between economic policy and everything else, which is what arguably distinguishes the EU from other forms of weak federalism. Even before the Euro crisis there were edge cases where economic jurisdiction bled into, for example, social issues (the ECJ ended up having to effectively rule on Irish abortion law under the free movement of services). Now it's even worse. Political parties in Greece and Ireland, for instance, have been co-opted into austerity policy by having the gun of exiting the Euro held to their heads. At that point the questions of the EU's democratic deficit and the sovereignty of its smaller members becomes more pressing. At some point, I suspect, the EU membership (Euro members especially) will find itself forced to pick between actual federalism and supra-nationalism.
This is very interesting, especially in the light of the coup-like conditions that surrounded legalizing the FRA mass surveillance.
However, this source is a populist extreme right newspaper. It has low credibility and regularly carries antagonism against the democratic parties. Can we have an independent, credible source verify the claims?
This seems to be false and fria tider doesn't seem to be the best of sources, even if the gist of the story is true. There are articles online in at least three major newspapers (aftonbladet.se, svd.se, dn.se)
Sweden isn't alone in this - the UK also vetoed the investigation. This investigation is one of two, the other being into data protection and EU citizens' right to privacy, which will go ahead.
Sweden passed a pretty extensive wiretap law in 2008, it wouldn't come as a great surprise (in these days) if they share information from that program with the US
They send stuff from their FRA-wiretaps to NSA for decryption, and NSA has 'promised' to send back what the US think that sweden need to know.
This shit is absolutely disgusting, but the foreign minister of Sweden, Carl Bildt, is known to cream his pants whenever he get attention from the US, so it's not surprising.
Come on, people. Every developed country with a budget with the possible exception of Germany is doing the exact same thing as the US. It would be irresponsible of them not to.
Germany is doing exactly the same. We have strong wiretapping laws, eg the G10-Gesetz which not only allows covert tapping but also data transfer to foreign intelligence agencies. No warrant required if national security is motivation for the tapping. Merkel is lying to everyone because elections are coming this September. I would not be surprised if they knew about NSA data collection before the Snowden leak.
Right now, they don't need a warrant and I bet it's already causing problems for some people because government employees misbehave when you give them a grey area like that. That's just a fact.
And you're not gonna hear about it because people are powerless. They can't react to it because it will get them in more trouble.
Those who say that isn't true are the ones who haven't experienced it or are the ones taking advantage of others in similar ways.
And what makes it even worse is that the governments store all the data for years, maybe even decades. History has told us this is going to become a huge problem. For a lot of people. We may not live long enough to experience what can happen but it's just a matter of time. And this generation is responsible for it.
To me as a supporter of the European Project, the entire thing is heartbreaking. We now have two crises that could possibly be the defining "history book moments" of our century badly mishandled by the "leaders" of Europe.
The UK managed to stop the EU from speaking with one voice so that each little country now has to send its easily ignorable complaints by itself. Good job.
Today is the day that I, as a continental European, have become a supporter of a swift EU exit for the UK. Trojan horses not welcome.
